Blog

Today in Social

Om profiles IndexTank, a startup offering hosted site search as a freemium service. The founder’s from Inktomi, so I expect the technologies will work (Om says they do for our GigaOM site). IndexTank also encourages a search apps ecosystem, but there’s no word on how distribution or licensing will work for those apps. Site search licensing is a pretty minuscule part of Google’s business, and I don’t see IndexTank as a reflection of the current controversy over search results quality. On the other hand, that’s why Blekko exists. Today it announced that editors from the tech Q&A site Stack Overflow would help curate its results by editing some of Blekko’s contextual search filters (hashtags, actually). Google’s also adding some human-power: it released a Chrome extension that allows users to blacklist the sites they judge produce spammy search results. That info goes back to Google, which may use it to tune its algorithm. That’s a great move: not only might it actually work, but its early users will no doubt come from that vocal digerati minority that is complaining the most about Google.